January 28, 2013

A little security issue

More Than A Dozen Brands Of Security Camera Systems Vulnerable To Hacker HijackingDigital video recorders have revolutionized home and business security, making it possible to easily store and play back hundreds of hours of surveillance camera footage. But a few design flaws in their software, it seems, can quickly turn the watchers into the watched.

Eighteen brands of security camera digital video recorders (DVRs) are vulnerable to an attack that would allow a hacker to remotely gain control of the devices to watch, copy, delete or alter video streams at will, as well as to use the machines as jumping-off points to access other computers behind a company�s firewall, according to tests by two security researchers. And one of the researchers, security firm Rapid7′s chief security officer H.D. Moore, has discovered that 58,000 of the hackable video boxes, all of which use firmware provided by the Guangdong, China-based firm Ray Sharp, are accessible via the Internet.

�The DVR gives you access to all their video, current and archived,� says Moore. �You could look at videos, pause and play, or just turn off the cameras and rob the store.�

Early last week a security researcher who goes by the name someLuser published a blog post detailing his dissection of a DVR built by the security firm Swann, disassembling the device and running tests on it via its serial port. He found that commands sent to the device via a certain connection, port 9000, were accepted without any authentication. And worse, he was able to use that unprotected connection to retrieve the login credentials for the DVR�s web-based control panel. �Anyone who can connect to port 9000 on the device can send this request and retrieve that information,� said someLuser, who declined to reveal his real name when I reached him by instant message.

I have one of these units for the shop -- it is not connected to the internet so there is no panic at the farm but it is still another example of security biting you in the butt...
someLuser's post is here: console cowboys
Oopsie...
Posted by DaveH at January 28, 2013 7:51 PM